In this post I'll be talking about a new electronic craps table, developed by TCS JohnHuxley. Dice have been around for at least 7,000 years and remained virtually unchanged throughout history. Some improvements have been made to the manufacturing processes, in the 20th century, but that didn't really make any significant changes to the dice. But the inventors of dice would have never dreamed of some kind of electronic craps table with some kind of touch-screen capabilities.
Below is a photo of the touch-screen craps layout. The entire surface of the layout is one giant touch-screen LCD. In other words, the chips and the dice are CG icons that can be visibly moved around by dragging your fingertips on the screen.

The concept of cards and dice appearing on a screen is not new to casinos. After all, slot machines are no longer mechanical, all the results are just displayed on the screen. But the problem with electronic slots is that there's absolutely no transparency. To put is simply, you put your money in the machine, press a button and then the machine tells you if you won or lost. It really boggles the mind how anyone could ever be so naïve to trust such a machine, that had a) obviously been designed to collect money for the casino and b) that offer absolutely no transparency in how the machine comes up with the results. But a sucker is born every minute and apparently there's no shortage of those that still hope they can win anything from these machines.
Unlike electronic slots that simply display the results generated by some kind of internal (and invisible) Random Number Generator [RNG] the touch-screen craps table uses a pair of actual physical dice to generate the random results. In other words, a pair of dice is used as a mechanical RNG, for this game. Below is a picture of the dice.

The dice are encased inside of an enclosure made of a glass dome and a vibrating plate. The plate visibly vibrates as the player drags the virtual dice on the LCD screen. Then, when the player releases the virtual dice, the vibrating plate produces some vigorous punches that really send the dice flying, as the virtual dice bounce off of the virtual walls of the LCD screen, apparently driven by their own inertia. The player can fully observe the physical dice as he is handling the virtual ones on the LCD layout. A camera on top of the dome reads the actual result of the physical roll and the same result is mirrored on the virtual dice. (A video demo is available on Cardshark.TV, under the title Touch-Screen Electronic Craps Table).
This handling definitely offers some transparency that would otherwise be totally nonexistent, if the virtual dice relied on some kind of internal RNG, such as slot machines do. However, despite this transparency it would still be very easy to gaff this equipment, simply by installing an electromagnet under the vibrating plate and using magnetic dice. But let's not get into this, yet, for now we are just examining a newly-developed piece of casino equipment.
Now that we understand how this thing works we may speculate on the practicality of this equipment.
First of all, this equipment was not primarily developed to replace traditional craps tables. The main purpose for this equipment is to be used in various gaming centers, that don't have a proper casino license. Gaming centers can be found in cities all over the world, in countries where casinos are not allowed, or where casinos are restricted just for foreigners. In many such places gaming centers are still allowed, but the games are restricted to various automated solutions. In other words, the games cannot be operated by croupiers.
So, for gaming centers this is a great solution. One of the main features of craps that has always attracted gamblers to that particular game is the fact that craps is the only casino game where the players can "control" their own results. Of course, this control is just an illusion, but nevertheless, in craps the player will never have a reason to blame the dealer or another player for his bad luck. After all, he rolled his own dice. Many craps players feel that this control of the dice gives them a real chance at winning. Since this electronic craps table still allows the players to shake their own dice as much as they please I feel the gadget has a good chance at being a the typical purchasers of this type of gaming equipment. But gamblers are a "flexible" bunch. And if they see a game they think they can beat, they are quick to adopt it.
In closing I should probably mention that ShuffleMaster also recently came up with an electronic craps table. But their table is totally different and I should save that for another post.